The miracle of life?

They say that the moment you hold your precious baby in your arms, you forget everything. You forget the four months of puking, the mind-numbing fatigue, the sneezing and peeing, the heartburn, insomnia, constant belching and general discomfort of carrying around more weight than you ever have in your life. They even say you forget the pain of labor.

For months, as I trudged (and waddled) through my pregnancy, I didn't believe them. Every time a mother would tell me you forget it all, my rebellious streak would rear up and I would think, Not me, I won't forget. 

Now two weeks after giving birth, I'll admit, in some ways they were right. I'm still not a big fan of pregnancy. As my friend Alina says, pregnancy is the "most unnatural natural state." As I struggled through it myself, I often thought there had to be a better way to duplicate the human race than have women blow up like balloons, cry during baby food commercials and develop cankles. I marveled as I walked around downtown Chicago that every person on the sidewalk had gotten here because some woman had given up her body for nine months.

Me and Owen

Pregnancy is particularly hard in this day and age, when most women are working and just because you're sick as a dog and huge as a house, your employer doesn't give you a break. You're still expected to meet your deadlines, sound intelligent on conference calls and show up to the office wearing some semblance of business casual. In my case, my employer refused my request to work from home the last two weeks of my pregnancy, even though they could see I had to leave my cubicle every 15 minutes to waddle to the bathroom to pee.

That said, pregnancy is something I am glad I experienced. It's just one of those things that until you've done it yourself, you have no idea what it's like. You can read all the pregnancy literature you want, listen to 100 of your friends' birth stories, but until you've vomited into your trash can at work and felt the baby kick and get the hiccups in utero, you really have no idea what it means to create life. You have no true understanding of the beautiful sacrifice it takes.

During the last month of my pregnancy, Dave and I were sitting in the doctor's office waiting for the midwife to come in when somehow we got on the topic of whether birth is a miracle. Dave, a philosophy major in college, started to pontificate as he sometimes does, that really it wasn't.

"Miracles are something unexpected, something scientifically impossible," he said. "Birth is what our bodies are designed to do. It's entirely natural. How can that be a miracle?"

Sitting on the examining table, the tissue paper crinkling beneath me as I struggled to find a comfortable position for my heaving belly, I just stared at him.

"Dave," I said sternly. "Just let me have my miracle."

That shut him up.

So is part of the miracle postpartum amnesia about all you've been through?

In some ways, yes. I can remember curling up into a ball and crying because I had yet another migraine. I can remember eating only fruit smoothies for days. I can remember how often I had to change my wet pants. But none of it feels visceral. With all of those symptoms gone now, thinking about them feels like I'm talking about someone else. It all kind of blurs together into some kind of folklore from a distant past.

I think the miracle of life is that we do things even when they're hard, even when we doubt our ability to make it through. And when I gaze down at my little boy's face, I'm so so glad I did.